Amara bit her lip. “Despite the loyalty a Citizen owes to the Crown and its heirs.”

The fingers of her husband’s blood-encrusted right hand clenched into a fist. “The man’s directly responsible for the deaths of more than four hundred of my friends and neighbors. Some of them my own bloody holders. According to Isana, he makes no secret of the fact that he may someday deem it necessary to kill my nephew.” He stared out at the lone figure in the plaza, and his quiet voice burned with heat without growing louder, while his green eyes seemed to gather a layer of frost. “The murdering son of a bitch should count himself lucky I haven’t paid him what he’s owed.” His lips pressed together, staring at Attis’s motionless, focused form amidst half a dozen enormous furies. “Right now, it’d be easy.”

“We need him,” Amara said.

Bernard’s jaw clenched.

Amara put a hand on his arm. “We need him.”

He glanced aside at her, took a slow breath, and made a motion of his head that was so miniscule that it could hardly be recognized as a nod. “Doesn’t mean I have to like—”

His head whipped around, and his body began to follow before Amara heard the light tread upon the stone roof. She turned to see a faint blur in the air, someone hidden behind a windcrafted veil and approaching with terrifying speed. Then there was a sound of impact and Bernard let out a croaking gasp, doubling over. The blur moved again, and Bernard’s head snapped violently to one side. Teeth knocked loose from his jaw rattled onto the roof like a small handful of ivory dice, and he crumpled to the floor beside them, senseless or dead.

Amara reached for Cirrus and her weapon simultaneously, but their attacker flung out a nearly invisible arm and a handful of salt crystals struck her, sending the wind fury into disruptive convulsions of ethereal agony. Her sword was not halfway from its sheath before a thread of cold steel, the tip of a long, slender blade, lay against her throat.

The blade shimmered into visibility, then the hand behind it, then the arm behind the hand, and suddenly Amara found herself facing the former High Lady of Aquitaine. Invidia stood clad all in black chitin, and that same horrible, pulsing parasite-creature was locked about her torso. Her hair was dark and unkempt, her eyes sunken, and her skin had an unhealthy pallor.

“And to think,” Invidia said. “I’ve spent the last half an hour scouring this entire plaza looking for the singulares I was sure Attis had hidden. Quite unlike him to use nonexistence as camouflage, though I suppose it did make them impossible to find. Hello, Countess.”

Amara shot her motionless husband a glance, swept her eyes over the plaza below, and clenched her teeth. “Go to the crows, traitor.”